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Productivity Tip | Anyone heard of the Zeigarnik Effect?

A Weekly Personal Productivity series to help you get more done!

Every Thursday, I’m sharing a new Personal Productivity Tip to help you get more done. Each Productivity Tip is a remarkably simple tool or concept that can be quickly implemented to make a real difference in your personal productivity. When you apply many of them together, they’ll make a big difference in improving productivity, achieving accountability and staying focused on the things that matter the most in your life.

What the hell is the Zeigarnik Effect?

Have you ever heard of the Zeigarnik Effect? It’s named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who stumbled across the notion in the 1920s that waiters remembered orders that were still unpaid better than those that were already completed. She returned to her lab, ran several experiments and further discovered that people remembered tasks better if they’d been interrupted doing them than if they’d completed them.

“Psychic Tension” drives us to closure

What she concluded has a lot to do with our short-term memory’s propensity to forget completely. The more we try to hold things in our short-term memory, the harder we have to work to remember them. It takes a lot of cognitive energy but with few results. Anyone have a different experience?

No surprise … we also seem to have a better memory for those things we have not yet finished. The “psychic tension” it creates remains a stimulus for us to keep moving forward, wrestling with that idea and continually straining to bring it to closure.

What’s the significance for Personal Productivity?

So, what does this mean for personal productivity? A bunch of things.

Don’t gasp at the size of the mountain. Head for a base camp.

First, we overburden our short-term memory trying to remember stuff we’ll forget anyway. The solution? Spend that time writing it down, effortlessly capturing it in your memory bank, er, trusted system so that it so it will show up at the appointed time and place.

We’re Masters of Procrastination!

Some like Jeremy Dean on his great PsyBlog, relate the Zeigarnik Effect to our remarkable capability for procrastination. He concludes that we’re more likely to cogitate about something that’s unfinished so that not starting something is less productive than getting it started any way you can. So, instead of gasping at the size of the mountain in front of you, get started by aiming for a base camp. Remember the Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step”? When in doubt, just start.

Believe it. Momentum Drives Success

Finally, it confirms one of my precepts … that momentum has tremendous power that is often overlooked. If you build some momentum by moving toward your objective with even the smallest step, you’ll be amazed at how that wave of energy will lift your spirits and help you drive something to the next level that would otherwise languish.

What do you think?

What are you doing to defeat the Zeigarnik Effect … to overcome procrastination … to generate momentum toward your objectives? What’s working and what isn’t?

Beating procrastination is a constant power struggle between starting and stopping. Gaining some momentum definitely helps in making some progress however the difficulty might be how to keep it going.
For me completing a good weekly review of my commitments usually helps to straight things up and define what needs to be done in upcoming days.
Thanks for very interesting post.

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Ready to mix it up a little?

If you're a fan of the Mystery-Thriller-Suspense genre, you can enjoy a little diversion and dive into some of the great reads you'll find here. I intend to stimulate your discovery of the good, the bad and the only genre where a ranch breakfast is a steel metal jacket dipped in cordite. Have fun!

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About Me

I am a leadership coach and a professional author and speaker, facilitating leadership groups among CEOs and senior business leaders in the SF Bay area.

I am the author or more than 125+ newspaper columns published by the SF Bay affiliate of the NY Times among the 500+ articles here. I have also written 3 ebooks about Leadership & Business Finance.

I have been married forever to a beautiful woman and have one spectacular daughter who has dedicated her life to helping children with life-threatening illnesses.
Read more ….

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Ready to mix it up a little?

If you're a fan of the Mystery-Thriller-Suspense genre, you can enjoy a little diversion and dive into some of the great reads you'll find here. I intend to stimulate your discovery of the good, the bad and the only genre where a ranch breakfast is a steel metal jacket dipped in cordite. Have fun!